Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

December was a record month at 1.11° C. January is another record at 1.13° C.

Watch The 1958 Frank Capra Film That Warns Of Global Warming

^ I saw that film in elementary school many times. It was a favorite and I was one of the students in charge of taking projection equipment to classrooms and showing the films. The global warming mention is fairly brief, not emphasized, and is easy to miss or be quickly forgotten.

Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries
By JUSTIN GILLIS FEB. 22, 2016

The oceans are rising faster than at any point in the last 28 centuries, and human emissions of greenhouse gases are primarily responsible, scientists reported Monday.

They added that the flooding that is starting to make life miserable in many coastal towns — like Miami Beach; Norfolk, Va.; and Charleston, S.C. — was largely a consequence of those emissions, and that it is likely to grow worse in coming years.

The scientists confirmed previous estimates, but with a larger data set, that if global emissions continue at a high rate over the next few decades, the ocean could rise as much as three or four feet by 2100, as ocean water expands and the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica begin to collapse.

Experts say the situation will grow far worse in the 22nd century and beyond, likely requiring the abandonment of many of the world’s coastal cities.

“I think we can definitely be confident that sea-level rise is going to continue to accelerate if there’s further warming, which inevitably there will be,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and co-author of a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

The upper estimate of three to four feet of sea-level rise in the 21st century rules out any large contribution from Antarctica in the near term, but that finding is tentative, given that the ice covering the western part of that continent is already showing signs of instability. And recent studies suggest that the destruction of large parts of the Antarctic ice sheet may have become inevitable, even though that could take hundreds or thousands of years to play out.

“Sea level is going to continue going up for many centuries,” Dr. Rahmstorf said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/science/sea-level-rise-global-warming-climate-change.html

coal industry death: https://t.co/xNZdC8IlmJ

Our Hemisphere’s Temperature Just Reached a Terrifying Milestone

As of Thursday morning, it appears that average temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere have breached the 2 degrees Celsius above “normal” mark for the first time in recorded history, and likely the first time since human civilization began thousands of years ago.

Using unofficial data and adjusting for different base-line temperatures, it appears that February 2016 was likely somewhere between 1.15 and 1.4 degrees warmer than the long-term average, and about 0.2 degrees above last month—good enough for the most above-average month ever measured. (Since the globe had already warmed by about +0.45 degrees above pre-industrial levels during the 1981-2010 base-line meteorologists commonly use, that amount has been added to the data released today.)

Keep in mind that it took from the dawn of the industrial age until last October to reach the first 1.0 degree Celsius, and we’ve come as much as an extra 0.4 degrees further in just the last five months. Even accounting for the margin of error associated with these preliminary datasets, that means it’s virtually certain that February handily beat the record set just last month for the most anomalously warm month ever recorded. That’s stunning.

somehow, though, this is even more surprising:

The data for February is so overwhelming that even prominent climate change skeptics have already embraced the new record. Writing on his blog, former NASA scientist Roy Spencer said that according to satellite records—the dataset of choice by climate skeptics for a variety of reasons—February 2016 featured “whopping” temperature anomalies especially in the Arctic. Spurred by disbelief, Spencer also checked his data with others released today and said the overlap is “about as good as it gets.” Speaking with the Washington Post, Spencer said the February data proves “there has been warming. The question is how much warming there’s been.”

Roy Spencer is the "official climatologist of the Rush Limbaugh show", and is infamous for pushing the claim that temperatures have been declining over the last 20 years, in the face of all evidence. i thought it would feel really good when people like that could no longer ignore the truth, but instead it's just even more depressing, somehow

another incredibly depressing paragraph:

Almost overnight, the world has moved within arm’s reach of the climate goals negotiated just last December in Paris. There, small island nations on the front line of climate change set a temperature target of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius rise by the year 2100 as a line in the sand, and that limit was embraced by the global community of nations. On this pace, we may reach that level for the first time—though briefly—later this year. In fact, at the daily level, we’re probably already there. We could now be right in the heart of a decade or more surge in global warming that could kick off a series of tipping points with far-reaching implications on our species and the countless others we share the planet with.

well fuckity fuck, that's awful

On the other hand, https://newmatilda.com/2016/03/03/gas-baron-killed-in-exploding-car-after-coming-under-fire-from-us-authorities/

Police say former Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon wasn't wearing a seat belt when his SUV slammed into a concrete embankment and burst into flames in Oklahoma City.

McClendon was notorious for being a bit foolhardy. The peaks of Chesapeake's chart all occurred in episodes of overexpansion, and he regularly invested his own money on the side in Chesapeake wells, even after the board ousted him.

He was also an early adopter of compressed natural gas vehicles. They don't have a stellar safety record.

He was most definitely not an early exponent of fracking. That honor goes to George Phydias Mitchell who threw money at the problem in the Barnett Shale around DFW for 15 years before Mitchell Energy achieved economic returns. All of the other oilmen are also-rans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo1Boie7mtI

high of 80 on the mid-atlantic east coast of the united states. march 9th. no biggie!

recommended reading, especially if you don't much about solar power, CSP vs PV, capacity factors, price volatility, etc:

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/10/11192022/big-solar-boom-times

it's by david roberts (formerly Grist), who is a good fit for Vox because he's able to take complicated subjects and boil them down to the essentials.

cool, thanks

CSP is pretty much dead IMO

I remember 10 years ago people said this would never happen. so there.

There are [resource issues](http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/pdfs/article_teln_ga_ieee_pv.pdf) with current PV technologies, so I think CSP, particularly using sodium or another high BP metal as the working fluid with heat-storage for off-peak produciton, still has a big place in the mix.

i noticed that solar power is becoming popular in my hometown, all of the giant houses in my old neighborhood (that they clearcut the forest behind my parents' house to build) are covered in solar panels now

i assume similar things are going on all over the 'burbs

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cdh4QfYUIAAQMlb.jpg

Antarctica’s ice is being carved up from below

For those who remember the simulation game Fate of the World from 2011, evidently its on Steam, bugs have been patched, and its somewhat playable. There was a pretty good discussion on Reddit:

Simulating Collapse in Fate of the World

• You're a skilled player if you can stay beneath 2.5 degree Celsius without triggering a complete collapse of global civilization, complete with nuclear warfare and billions of deaths.
• China's development has to be restrained, while India's development has to be sabotaged if anything.
• It's practically impossible to survive without provoking an (economic) collapse. The trick here is to engineer an artificial collapse, without letting the collapse run out of control.
You need to buy yourself time, before your new technologies are ready that are supposed to solve your problems.
• It can ironically be best to keep people rather right-wing and chauvinistic. Green politics cause people to reject geoengineering, which means that you have no way to stop the positive feedback loops of Arctic methane and forest fires that cause temperatures to further spiral out of control. It's also an advantage to have a xenophobic population that wants refugees to be shot on sight when trying to cross the border. Refugees after all, are not productive members of society until they are integrated into society.
• You can't really survive the 22nd century without science-fiction technologies. You can use geo-engineering to keep temperatures low, but eventually your intervention in the atmosphere becomes so large that you get big droughts and other problems. It's possible to nearly completely decarbonize Western economies, but it takes time and money to introduce such technologies in third world countries, which will emit carbon in the meantime. It might be possible to get emissions down by 80%, but that merely buys you some time, eventually you run into the same problems that you would run into otherwise.
• Players of the game were upset, because it's not really easy to win and you generally have billions of deaths, even if you do quite well. What did they do? They made a mod that removes the worst positive feedback effects of climate change!

Billions of deaths sounds grimly realistic.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/22/james_hansen_sea_level_rise_climate_warning_passes_peer_review.html

so what else about the latest Hansen estimates?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-reid/james-hansen-talks-climat_b_9557920.html

Did anyone post about the extensive bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef?

For half a century, climate scientists have seen the West Antarctic ice sheet, a remnant of the last ice age, as a sword of Damocles hanging over human civilization.

The great ice sheet, larger than Mexico, is thought to be potentially vulnerable to disintegration from a relatively small amount of global warming, and capable of raising the sea level by 12 feet or more should it break up. But researchers long assumed the worst effects would take hundreds — if not thousands — of years to occur.

Now, new research suggests the disaster scenario could play out much sooner.

Continued high emissions of heat-trapping gases could launch a disintegration of the ice sheet within decades, according to a study published Wednesday, heaving enough water into the ocean to raise the sea level as much as three feet by the end of this century.

With ice melting in other regions, too, the total rise of the sea could reach five or six feet by 2100, the researchers found. That is roughly twice the increase reported as a plausible worst-case scenario by a United Nations panel just three years ago, and so high it would likely provoke a profound crisis within the lifetimes of children being born today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/science/global-warming-antarctica-ice-sheet-sea-level-rise.html

the worst case scenario keeps getting worse

if i were canada, i would build a border wall to keep us out

well good, it might act as a dam for about 3 days

http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/why-our-intuition-about-sea_level-rise-is-wrong

This Harvard geophysicist has some interesting theories on how the gravitational distribution of melting glaciers and ice sheets from Greenland could actually raise the sea level by 30% in the southern hemisphere, whilst at least in the short term, local sea levels could actually drop.

oh christ i can just hear james inhofe alrady

You probably need to actually read it properly then.

This century, any gravitational effects from the Greenland melt will be swamped by the melt's effects in slowing thermohaline circulation. The Gulf Stream appears to be slowing down long before its usual spots nearer Iceland, so aside from a cooler Arctic Atlantic and worse storms for Europe, the stalled stream also deposits is heat in the mid-American coast, raising local sea levels by thermal expansion.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-percentile-mntp/201501-201512.gif

xp
oops, possibly misunderstood your comment there. I thought you meant Mitrovica was sounding like him.

i think the jim inhofe reference is that in such a crazy situation (where sea levels are 30% higher in the southern hemisphere and dropping in the north), inhofe could be expected to be like "derp derp hey climate change is a hoax, sea levels are falling off the gulf coast, derp derp derp!"

btw if i read the interview correctly, the temporary 30% rise in the southern hemisphere is a thought experiment based on the greenland ice sheet suddenly collapsing overnight - not something that anyone thinks is going to happen. Richard Alley thinks it will be centuries. not that it isn't a concern and not that it doesn't obviously contribute to sea level rise, but the sudden collapse thing isn't a thing.

Sorry Your Fav..., Britisher misunderstanding there and no offence intended.

I absolutely love Nautilus, but I always get this feeling that it is way too stylish and fun to be true science.

http://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-why-the-north-pole-is-moving-east-1769588584

what does this increased speed in positional shift affect?

The most sophisticated model to date:

DeConto RM and Pollard D, 2016. Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise. Nature, 531(7596), pp.591-597.

Polar temperatures over the last several million years have, at times, been slightly warmer than today, yet global mean sea level has been 6–9 metres higher as recently as the Last Interglacial (130,000 to 115,000 years ago) and possibly higher during the Pliocene epoch (about three million years ago). In both cases the Antarctic ice sheet has been implicated as the primary contributor, hinting at its future vulnerability. Here we use a model coupling ice sheet and climate dynamics—including previously underappreciated processes linking atmospheric warming with hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs—that is calibrated against Pliocene and Last Interglacial sea-level estimates and applied to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500, if emissions continue unabated. In this case atmospheric warming will soon become the dominant driver of ice loss, but prolonged ocean warming will delay its recovery for thousands of years.

Alas, 15 m isn't an option at geology.com's Global Sea Level Rise Map, but that total ~20 m rise (incl contributions from Greenland and thermal expansion) puts my current position as 30 miles from the nearest dry land in the year 2525.

I think my good friend in Houston is finally giving up and moving. This current flood is just the final straw, because even when it's dry ... it's still Houston.

Any ILXors down there?

Sanpaku iirc! And a couple others I can't recall off the top

Looking at Sanpaku's graphic from 2 weeks ago, I think the record coldest area just off the southern tip of Greenland worries me even more than the record warmest ones.

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/northwestern-us-80-degree-record-warmth-to-spread-from-san-francisco-seattle-portland/56741765?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link

I haven't lived in Houston for 5 years. I'm in a New Orleans suburb.

xp. it's july warm in vancouver, bc, has been for a few days. records broken throughout the province for april, as they were at the end of march when we had a hot spell. forest fires have started in northern b.c. and alberta.

really starting to feel like the beginning of the end huh

Welcome to the New Era. Let's hope it doesn't accelerate any faster than it already has, because (to use a phrase) the changes to come over the next decade or more are already baked in to the system and nothing we do today can avoid them now.

i am currently in houston (though leaving in a week--hooray). but i also grew up here and this kind of flooding has been happening here pretty much since forever. it's a poorly placed city, global warming or not.

Like most heavy industry cities, Houston location amidst the poorly draining bayous and mosquitos between the Trinity and Brazos is an artifact of resource distribution. Houston is a perfectly placed port for exporting the oil found around Kilgore in 1930, and the subsequent infrastructure investment in pipeline hubs, refineries and chemical plants isn't going to move. The wealthy all live on the better drained west side, far from the sources of Houston's early wealth.

> really starting to feel like the beginning of the end

The human mind is as ill-made to comprehend multigenerational threats. 2015-16 is an outlier in a long-standing trend and like the past very strong El Niño in 1997-98, it will probably be used by deniers to persuade themselves of a pause in warming for another decade. There seem more then enough voters whose concerns don't extend beyond proximate threats like jobs, immigration, abortion or terrorism to ensure we collectively fiddle about the edges of the problem for decades to come.

The rest of the biosphere is surely rooting for antibiotic resistant pandemics.